Lydia Davis: Mastering the short form

Lydia Davis’ short stories — sometimes as short as a paragraph or even a sentence — are written in language that is relatively direct and simple, yet they resist easy interpretation.
Many are spare cross-sections of an instant or a thought; like someone sunk in meditation, they track the spiraling movement of an impulse or desire. Others are more narrative, often with a surreal touch. Hers are wryly humorous stories that push at the boundaries of the form, to be read as much for style as for content.
In the dream world of Davis’ stories, a woman simmers with resentment toward the mice who forage happily through her neighbors’ homes while shunning her own messier kitchen; timid brothers-in-law turn to dust and are eventually swept up and thrown away without anyone’s even noticing; and people simply move into the upper rooms of a house when the sea rises and fills the first floor.
Davis has been teaching creative writing at the University at Albany since 2002; she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2003. The four books of short stories she has published to date were recently issued as “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.” Davis has also authored a novel, “The End of the Story.” She spoke by phone from her home in Rensselaer County.
Q: Your stories can be elliptical, yet your language is usually simple and direct. Is that intentional?
A: Well, I guess, of the two models, I prefer to have a complex idea expressed simply, rather than a simple idea obfuscated.
Q: In your stories, there is little mention of things specific to this culture and this time — there’s no Facebook and no computers, for instance. Usually your stories are populated with people, houses, animals, plants and the sea — no machines or technology — and so have almost a fairy tale feeling, like they could be occurring anywhere or anytime. Is this something you do consciously?
A: This didn’t come out of any deliberate decision not to use cultural markers. But I guess that if I ever put in one of those markers, I would instinctively take it out. It’s partly a matter of associations. If I use a phrase like “New York City” or “Trailways bus,” the reader’s going to bring up a whole host of associations that I might not want. But if I simply say “bus,” it could be a bus anywhere, in Mexico, or Yugoslavia, or the Czech Republic. So that actually calls up more in a way, whereas “Trailways bus” restricts it very much.
Q: Have you always tended to write shorter work? I know you have written one novel, too.
A: It sort of depends on what the material demands. I like the short form, but I didn’t really come to it until I’d been writing for a few years.
Q: What did you start out writing?
A: More traditional short stories. I think by then I knew some of Beckett’s and Kafka’s short works, but that just didn’t seem to be something that people did. I thought that what you do, if you’re going to write short stories, is write short stories. So that’s what I tried to learn to do for a few years, and I think it was good training. Then I realized I didn’t have to go on doing that.
Q: How did you come to that realization?
A: Oh, I’d been working on one story that seemed to take forever. I kept coming back to it, changing things, adding things; it’s the one called “In the Northern Country” (at 19 pages, a relatively long Davis story). At the same time, I came upon a book of Russell Edson’s — what he calls poems but are actually short narratives. And it was just such an odd thing he was doing that I got kind of excited and thought, “Wow, you can really do anything you want to.” So then I started writing very, very short things. And it was good.
Q: Do you live in Albany or commute here?
A: I actually live out in the country. We live on the edge of a little village, and it’s a nice combination, to have a little civilization, but coyotes in the backyard.
Elizabeth Floyd Mair is a freelance writer living in Guilderland.